Musics

In the past few days, I've run through a varied range of musical experiences, and I'm wondering what they tell me.
On Tuesday afternoon my wife and I attended the last in a series of lecture/concerts on Chopin and Liszt, given by the brilliant pianist-composer-conductor-lecturer Gil Shohat. This session was devoted to the "demonic" Liszt, and the major guest performer was the brilliant Israeli pianist Dorel Golan, who, as usual, played magnificently. In the end, however, I decided that I'm not a big fan of Liszt. His pieces seem to me to wander all over and to depend too much on fantastic piano technique. See if you can play this! At a recital, I'd be happy to hear one piece by Liszt, but not a whole program.
Later that evening I has a flute lesson. I played 2 duets with my teacher. One is by Kaspar Kummer hardly a household name among music lovers. The duet is kind of vapid when you only play one of the parts. Together it sounds fine. But there's a lot of pointless running around in it. I worked on it for a month or more, and I learned a lot by doing that, but I was glad to get it behind me. Then we played the first part of a sonata by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, which is a much more interesting piece of music (too interesting, my teacher said). He was surprised that we managed to stay together from beginning to end, because the rhythms are complicated, and the parts seldom come together. But I played it too slowly. So that's a summer project.
Since I'm a grownup, my teacher more or less lets me call the shots, and I've been playing duets with him, because I love it. Also, he's so good, that he pushes me upward. His tone is enviable, and hearing him while I play helps me improve my own sound.
Then, on Wednesday night, I went to the Yellow Submarine, a venue known to Jerusalem pop and jazz fans, to hear my friend and teacher, Stephen Horenstein lead a group of musicians he calls the Lab Orchestra in an intense new piece called Tabular Rasa. The piece ranges from slow, melodic, tonal passages to cacophonous noise, from tranquility to intense anxiety, from clean solo passsages through discordant ensemble passages. I don't know whether the performance was recorded, but I can't imagine enjoying a CD of it as much as I enjoyed seeing it develop with a mixture of spontaneity and planning.
Finally, last night, we went to a screening at the Cinematheque of two short films about Oriental Jewish musicians, from Egypt and Iraq, who, against all odds, maintained their traditions here in Israel, during the 1950s, when it was almost suppressed by lack of government support and indifference and hostility on the part of the Ashkenazi public. One of the featured musicians was the Egyptian-born Felix Mizrahi, and among the most moving scenes was his visit to an oud-maker in Cairo, where he plays on a lousy Chinese violin with a wonderful young oud player. The communication and mutual appreciation of the two musicians was inspiring.
How fortunate one is to be able to hear and play so many different kinds of music.

Espressivo, Cantabile, with Feeling

Four of my relatives got together and gave me a tape recorder for my Bar-Mitzvah. I used to attach wires with clips to the input of the loudspeaker on my parents' high fidelity system (I don't remember whether it was even stereo back then) and record broadcasts from WQXR. Once I happened to record Stravinsky's ballet, The Soldier's Tale, which I am listening to now, as I write, a version without the narrative. I was enthralled and listened to it again and again, while my contemporaries were listening to Elvis Presley. (I was proudly out of it as a teenager.)
I remember reading that Stravinksy didn't mark his scores with emotional directives like "espressivo." Actually, what I remember is that he argued against using them, but, in fact, he did put them in his scores. But I agree with his argument, whether or not he practiced what he preached. Why would anyone play any way except expressively? Why would anyone play in a non-singing way? Why would anyone want to play any other way except with feeling?
I recently joined a wind orchestra with a dynamic, young conductor, and the rehearsals are fun and challenging. Last week he had us rehearse a piece with complicated rhythms (less complicated than Stravinsky's) and told us not to try to play it musically. "Just play the notes."
He's definitely right, because if we can't play the notes right, in the right rhythms, we'll never be able to play it musically. I wonder whether, once we do get the notes right, we'll play it musically in spite of ourselves. I expect so.
Now and then I have written music on notation programs. Unless you write in crescendos and diminuendos, ritardandos and fermatas, the computer plays the music back entirely without expression at the same dynamic level, with absolute rhythmical regularity and perfect pitch, without responding emotionally to the notes it's sounding. Nevertheless, it's often hard to hear the music that way. Our ears - my ears, at any rate - supply a lot of the emotion that's lacking in the electronic monotony.
I couldn't play like a computer if I tried (which isn't to say that my playing is as musical as it should be), and when I'm learning a piece, and a third of the way in, the composer writes, "espressivo," I think to myself: Was I supposed to be playing without expression up to now?

He Don't Got Rhythm, and I Think I Know Why

Last night I heard Roberto Tarenzi an Italian jazz pianist play in a private home, a wonderful house concert. Parenthetically and surprisingly, this being Jerusalem, which sometimes seems like a city of five hundred. I barely knew anyone there, a pleasant change. The pianist was a thoroughgoing professional, knowledgeable about jazz and an imaginative improviser. His main influences were Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner, two giants of jazz piano.

Everything was there except swing.
If you listen to Bill Evans (this is a picture of him), you'll hear him play a lot of dreamy stuff, but he can also play with swing, and I don't think Tyner can play without swing. However, to my ear, at any rate, Tarenzi doesn't swing.
I think the reason for that is that his native language is Italian. Unlike English, and many other languages, including Hebrew, which have very strong stresses, Italian flows melodiously, as does French, for that matter. Listen to this bombastic clip of Vittorio Gassman talking and then reciting Dante.
There are plenty of stresses in Italian, but they aren't the regular, constant stresses of English. It doesn't quite have a beat.
Rhythm is always an issue in music.
One of my problems in playing flute is failing to get the sixteenth notes up to speed, and, when I play them slowly at a tempo I can manage, I tend to rush and trip over my fingers. My teacher, at my most recent lesson, told me that music is not an extreme sport, that if I feel the adrenaline in my veins, I should snooze. Better yet, I tell myself, I should feel the beat.
Yet, part of the drama of listening to music is feeling that the performer is playing at the upper limits of her ability, that adrenaline is pumping through her. The ultimate goal is to be totally relaxed and confident that the notes will fall into place, and totally intense about making them fall into place. Trying as hard as you can and making it sound as if you don't have to try.
That, as I understand it, is swing, as demonstrated by Fats Waller, who rushes a lot in this clip, but whose swing is fantastic.